


The Long Con

by LadyNogs



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Con Artists, Daddy Issues, Gen, Headcanon ran away with me, I'm Sorry, Loki Feels, Odin's A+ Parenting, THAT SCENE, This is what happens when I think too much, Thor: The Dark World, lying liars who lie, not sorry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 07:51:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyNogs/pseuds/LadyNogs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's always a two-man con.</p>
<p>Always.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Con

**Author's Note:**

> So I may have re-read Neil Gaiman's American Gods shortly before going to see The Dark World.
> 
> And I may have had a flash of inspiration.
> 
> I may also have let said flash of inspiration entirely run away with me.
> 
> Thus, this little intro - which is rapidly becoming a much longer piece. No guarantees on when I'll update, because I am a horrible person with way too many things going on.

It really was a genius piece of trickery. If he had been anyone else, Loki might even have offered praise for the cunning of the plan, but of course that simply would not do.

There were aspects of it that concerned him, of course, but he was well aware that any plan of battle was only good until the armies took the field. And all the Nine Realms knew he was good at improvising.

That the plan had originated with the Allfather, well, that had been less of a surprise than the plan itself. Loki may have learned his skills with illusion from Frigga, but his silver tongue had come from Odin.  
  
The pristine cell had only just begun to grate, when Odin first came to visit him. His mo - no, Frigga, now, not mother - had brought him books, and a set of fine chairs for his visitors. It would seem she, at least, harbored the delusion that he had friends, loved ones who would visit. She came regularly, if only via illusion, to ask after his health, his comfort. He had not expected her visits to elicit such pain.

But Frigga was not due for days, and Loki had not bothered with pretense - what use were illusions of armor, when the only eyes to see were the mindless brutes Thor had gathered from the warring realms?

He was absorbed in a tome on the treaties with Vanaheim, his mind idly working through ways to sunder their alliance, when the dungeons grew silent, the marauders falling still. The Einherijar - a whole phalanx - marched with great purpose, falling into a defensive box, and Loki peered over the edge of his book to meet the Allfather's considering gaze.

The guards withdrew without hesitation, and oh, how that burned. Was he so little threat, then? He who had brought monsters into the royal chambers, he who had mastered the Tesseract, who had been rightful king? Did the Allfather think him tamed?

Odin was silent for a long while, and Loki noted the lines of strain at the corner of eye and mouth, the once golden mane turned to frost.

"My son," he said, and paused.

"Laufey's son," Loki corrected.

"No, Loki. For all your misdeeds, you are still my son." Loki stayed silent, cocking an eyebrow. "What do you know of the mortal Jane Foster?"

"Thor's little pet? Little enough. Rumor has it she has him mourning like a woman." He closed the book. "Erik Selvig sung her praises often enough, until the Tesseract freed him from his blindness."

Odin's sigh was pained, and Loki smirked, unable to resist the urge to drive that particular knife deeper.

"Oh yes, the Tesseract is such a useful little tool. Pity you never had the skill to master it. Perhaps you could have extinguished my kind long before my birth, and saved yourself the weregild your folly has cost the throne of Asgard." Loki clenched the book tightly. It wouldn't do to reveal how his hands still shook, at even the mere mention of the Tesseract. He forced his features to leer with menace, ignoring the itch that burned his bones. Blue flashed through his mind's eye, blue and blood and bone, his flesh a playground for the Chitauri beasts, the Tesseract an aching lure, such power, such strength as he had never known. He loathed that he still craved it, but the craving would ease, once he was free.

"Oh, Loki," the Allfather sighed. "Your lust for power was ever your undoing." Odin stepped through the shimmering golden curtain of light that formed the wards of his cell and sat heavily in one of the ornately carved chairs. "Your mother sends her love." Loki fought the urge to strangle the old man. "Jane Foster is in Asgard."  
The words were spoken with such flat finality, such lack of inflection, that Loki was unable to hide his shock. Why had the Allfather permitted this? Even in his youth, he had never been so cruel as to torment a mortal with even so much as a glimpse of Asgard.

"She is carrying some sort of magical affliction."

"Dying, then," Loki mused. "Thor must have been particularly persuasive." The Allfather eyed him, his gaze calculating.

"All of Asgard knows that your knowledge of the sorcerous arts is unparalleled, my son. And your knowledge of strategy nearly so. Humor an old man, and tell me your thoughts on this puzzle: a king has two sons, and but one throne. His kingdom faces a threat that is beyond any one man's ability to defeat. One son wants not the throne, but to stay by the side of the woman who carries this threat all unwitting. One son wants the throne, at the expense of all who love him and all that he might have loved. The king must forbid the first from leaving the kingdom, and the second from claiming the throne in his brother's absence." Odin paused, and Loki smiled. For a brief moment, he could have been a child again, playing at politics and word games. In truth, the only change was the stakes - all of the Allfather's puzzles had been actual plots, real situations. Loki had learned well from them.

“I assume that if the king tells the first son that he must stay, he will become ever more dead set on leaving, since he is stubborn and bull-headed and idiotic?” Loki quipped, his smile edging from malice to fondness.

“He is strong-willed, yes.”

“And the second son, given the opportunity, will lay waste to any who stand in his way, and be damned to him?” Loki could feel his features betraying him - emotions flickering across them like ripples on a still pond, treacherous and fickle and frightening, for he had thought his control was better than this.

“The king has hope, that the second son might be willing to lay aside his vengeance.” The Allfather’s voice was unutterably weary. He sounded old. Loki wondered, for a moment, if Odin had perhaps realized that he was not entirely blameless, but he held his tongue, letting the puzzle turn over in his mind.

“And what of the king? What are his wishes in this?”

“The king...” Odin mused, a smile playing across his weathered face. “The king wishes peace in his kingdom, and freedom from care. The father wishes peace for his family, and an end to strife.”

Loki considered the puzzle, knowing that it was a thinly veiled version of his own tormented history. And so he filled in the blanks, his mind turning to the cold calculation that such games always required - in order to win, one must remove sentiment, for good or ill. Kingdoms rose and fell on the ability of their king to make difficult decisions - Loki’s instruction in these lessons had been recent, swift, and painful.

“This is my solution,” Loki said, letting his head fall back against the wall. “The king’s sons are too far estranged. Reconciliation is impossible, without dire circumstances to force them to accord. They are both of them too ruled by sentiment and the grievances that drove them to such desperate measures. The quarrel runs too deep to be set aside for something as amorphous as a threat unnamed. If you but give them reason, they will tear each other to pieces before they ever turn their eyes to the good of the kingdom.”

“Svartelheim,” Odin said, and Loki felt the world drop away from beneath his feet. Like falling off the Bifrost, like tumbling through the Void, like the crushing defeat at the hands of the green beast on Midgard - the word echoed in his head like tumblers turning in a lock, as though it were the key to a hundred half-lost memories. He found himself on his feet, towering over the Allfather, rage and terror and something like desperate hope coursing through him.

“The Aether? She has found the Aether?” Odin nodded. “That vicious little minx, I should like to know how she stumbled across that particular piece of nastiness.” He forced himself to back away, pacing the length of the cell, his hands locked behind his back. It kept them from clutching at Odin’s throat and shaking themselves to bits. “This changes everything. She cannot remain here. You know as well as I that the alignment nears. And when it does, with the Aether awakened, it means that all of Malekith’s wrath will fall on Asgard, and he is not so gentle as I have been.” Realization crept through him. “You knew. You knew it was not destroyed. You are Bor’s son, of course you knew. You knew all along, that one day it would come to this. Is it not said that Odin sees all? That Huginn and Muninn see both past and future?” He wheeled, stricken, to see the sorrow on the Allfather’s face. “All along, you knew it would come to this. You orchestrated it all, didn’t you? That day, in the weapons vault, with the Casket - I was right. I was no more than a stolen relic, to be used when the world came down ‘round your head, to goad Thor into accepting a throne he never wanted, so that you could withdraw and save your own sorry hide!” He was appalled to hear his own voice break, his throat hot and tight with rage. He had been shouting.

The Allfather looked pained, and Loki bit his lip to keep the flood of horror and viciousness from boiling over his teeth.

"No, Loki." Those words, those damned words, again - but no. He was older, wiser, more hardened now. He shoved down the boy's pain, swallowed the grief that even now seemed to mock him with its bitterness. Sentiment - no, not mere sentiment, but weakness, a frailty that he could not afford. Let the tumblers slip, let them grate and settle, let them fall before moving the pick.

The answer fell into his mind like a stone in a still pool, ripples of consequence spooling out ahead of those words.

"You wish him to defy you." 

He forced his words to calmness, forced his voice and face to mirror a stillness he did not feel, would never feel again. "You wish him not to take on your mantle, to forge his way with the mortal, to abandon the plans you so carefully laid." The grin that spread across his features was perhaps less controlled than he would have wished, perhaps a touch more cruel. "And so you come to me."


End file.
